Digital Soapbox

Brian Ratzker — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:04:36 +0000

Welcome to Digital Soapbox! This blog is dedicated to my love for technology. Hopefully, you will enjoy my opinions of the latest and greatest happenings in the technology world. My background is in Online Marketing and a technology enthusiast since childhood. I have also been involved with the Internet and web technologies since 1996. Please feel free to send me any cool stuff you find out there because I’m sure I will always be looking for new things to learn and write about.

Google Takes Another Shot at Social Media Success with Buzz

Brian Ratzker — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 13:45:03 +0000

Well, Google is taking it’s next stab at creating their own social media network. I was reading about Google Buzz this morning in Marketing Pilgrim and it seems interesting. Google Buzz will provide some “Wave Like” features in Gmail to try and create a social network out of an existing email network. Utilizing Gmail is the genius part of the plan, although it took them long enough to realize that they already had a network of people that were communicating with each other. The biggest issue I can see is how many people actually go to Gmail to check their email? I am sure there is a large percentage of Gmail users that only use the web but in the age of everyone owning a smart phone, that number must be diminishing. I am sure they will find a great way to integrate this into Android phones but they also need to create a new iPhone App that makes it easier to use all of Google’s great applications such as Google Reader and Google Voice. I can’t stand using web apps and that seems to be Google’s answer to iPhone users. Anyway, Google Wave, oh wait I mean Buzz, is certainly a step in the right direction but until they figure out a way to integrate it into the programs we use to check our Gmail, it will likely fall short of expectations. Brian Ratzker

Adam Lasnik is Quick to Defend his Comments about SEO Factors

Brian Ratzker — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 20:56:34 +0000

I just ran across a blog post written by Andrew Goodman in regards to commments made by Adam Lasnik, Search Evangelist at Google. Adam recently spoke at the SEM ‘09 conference about common SEO suggestions that really don’t help in improving search engine rankings. SEO Factors Mentioned:

Meta Tags – Not considered in algorithm, most SEO’s knew this already.
Keywords in URL – Little value in algorithm, nobody really knew how much value this actually had but certainly interesting to hear.
H1 and H2 Tags – Not considered in algorithm, this is big news in the SEO community.

Does this mean you should stop optimizing these factors, certainly not. These SEO factors can still help with your rankings, just not in the way we may have thought. For example, an optimized H1 Tag may not directly help with increasing your rankings for a page of content but it may cause someone to link to your content with the Keyword utilized in your H1 just because you inadvertently suggested the appropriate anchor text to them. As you can imagine, Adam’s comments have been questioned within the SEO community as a way to downplay the importance of certain SEO factors in order to push Google’s agenda. In the comments of Andrew Goodman’s post, Adam fires back at these critics:

“First, I actually suggested to people that if they’re building new sites or rearchitecting their site, they should consider making user-friendly URLs, including hyphens instead of underscores. Regarding a few of your other points: - Yes, Matt was telling something (re meta keywords) that a lot of SEOs know… but a surprisingly large number of webmasters around the world did NOT know. How else to explain the continued proliferation of very-stuffed meta keyword tags ’round the web? Why not set the record straight and save webmasters a lot of wasted time? - More importantly, I have to heartily disagree with your implication that Google’s interests and webmasters’ interests are fundamentally at odds. While Matt and I and others on our team can’t give away our secret sauce, we *want* webmasters to do well, we *want* great quality pages to rank highly in Google. The advice we give (in hundreds of videos, blog posts, in-person talks, online webinars, etc.) is designed to help webmasters who create great content. So when we minimize the importance of, say, “keyword density” or submitting your site to “100 top directories!!1,” we’re doing this because we’d rather webmasters put their energy into stuff that’ll actually please their users and improve their sites’ presence in Google. With few exceptions, we’re on the same side here. Controversy and conspiracy make for more fun blog posts, but don’t match up with reality very well.”

It will be interesting to see how this play’s out and what everyone thinks about Adam Lasnik’s comments, let me know what you think.

Thesis is a Great SEO Friendly Theme for WordPress

Brian Ratzker — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 01:13:25 +0000

I recently switched from Drupal over to WordPress. Drupal is a great open source platform but I really liked what I saw with this Thesis Theme that everyone has been raving about. The theme is known to be SEO friendly and fairly easy to customize. I have been playing with the theme for about a week. You can definitely customize your Blog to a point that is above my expertise. Although, there are simple to understand features to make updates on your own such as changing the column layout and choosing how your blog posts are displayed. The code of the theme is very clean and is setup perfectly for SEO out of the box. This doesn’t necessarily mean that if you build your website or blog with this theme that you will automatically get good rankings in the search engines. You still have to build great content and attract incoming links but the structure of your website can often be a stumbling block with SEO. You can setup many other themes in WordPress to be well optimized for the search engines with the helpful plugins that currently exist. With Thesis, there is no need to install the majority of those plugins because your website will already be well optimized. The cost of Thesis is a little pricey for most, $87. I would normally tell you to look elsewhere because there are so many great themes available out there for free. In this case, the money you spend is well worth it. You’re paying for the theme to be maintained and improved which is extremely important because it is pain to redo your website when the theme developer gives up on maintaing what they created. Take a look at my website, I really didn’t change that much out of the box and then take a look at all these websites. Thesis is a great theme and everyone that uses it can potentially create a very unique website that is Search Engine ready!

Twitterfon Rebrands as Echofon and Changes it’s Potential

Brian Ratzker — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 17:52:49 +0000

TwitterFon just changed their name to Echofon, in case you were confused. I like their iPhone application because it is easy to use and has a great method of displaying a difference between the Tweets you have read and have not read. The only caveat is that the unread Tweets become read if you switch tabs. The other issue I had was that there was no way to keep your unread messages synced with a desktop application. That is all about to change. Echofon already has an excellent Firefox plugin that I used to use before I needed to use multiple accounts at the same time. Now, both of the above applications sync together and allow you to save your unread messages between your desktop and iPhone. Furthermore, they are planning to launch a native Mac OS X application soon that may become a great alternative to TweetDeck, Tweetie or Seesmic. I am looking forward to it’s launch but in the meantime checkout their iPhone application, I highly recommend it.

Time and Digg Team Up for a Crowdsourcing Powerplay

Brian Ratzker — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 01:24:50 +0000

According to an article in Adweek today, Time.com has seen a 164 percent increase in it’s traffic from the social news property Digg. This spike in traffic helped increase Time.com’s year over year traffic by 41 percent. All it took was a custom widget that Digg provided to Time.com displaying the most Dugg stories from Time’s website.

This simple widget was all that was needed in doubling the Time.com stories that were placed on Digg’s homepage each month. Considering there are many content developers that would pay big money to be on the homepage of Digg just once, their partnership was a tremendous win for everyone involved. Digg has proven their ability to drive traffic to their own web property and generate revenue through sponsorships but now they have proof of their potential impact on the revenue of the websites that provide the content that makes Digg so successful. With publishers scrambling to increase their revenue streams and attempting to survive this ever changing landscape, this will certainly open many eyes. Digg may have just stumbled upon a gold mine that will finally propel them into a property that might justify the lofty valuations that once made them a potential acquisition target and media darling.